


Voices in the Dark

by Dardrea



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: And it was late and I was tired, Angst, Blood, But then I am far too suggestible, F/M, Kinda freaked myself out writing it, Not a lot of romance going on, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 03:49:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7298278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dardrea/pseuds/Dardrea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I find Dr. Bernier somewhat off-putting? This is not a prediction or theory though, just a what-if. </p><p>Also, completely un-betaed and I’m doing that thing where I post right-now-this-very-second so I can’t talk myself out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Voices in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know for sure how this works since I made a new pseud, but if anyone who might have actually followed me for my foray into the beautiful tragedy that was Rumbelle can see this: STOP what you are doing and go listen to The Black Tapes podcast and Tanis podcast. I’m not even kidding, do it NOW. You won’t regret it! …uhm…unless it’s nighttime in your corner of the world. Then maybe start with Tanis and hold off on The Black Tapes until the sun is out? ^_^

“Strand!” Alex’ voice was faint, thready. In a stronger moment she'd have resented the weakness in it but at the moment she was only grateful she was able to speak at all. Her vocal chords were tight, her throat near paralyzed by panic.

She thought he was talking to her but she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t even swear she’d heard his voice when he’d picked up. “Hello?” she _thought_ she’d heard him say, his rough, low voice even and calming as it almost always was. Would it really be so calm when she called him at...whatever mad time of night she was calling? Had she really heard him? Or was it just that she so desperately wanted to? _Apophenia_ she could hear him lecturing, with that wry smirk for a world that was so easily misled.

She whimpered, but the sound caught tight in her chest, more pain than vocalization.

“Ri—Richard?” she managed, perhaps, but she had to cover her mouth and swallow her own words to protect herself from the smell, so thick and foul she could taste it. It was on her, but she tried not to think about that. It was all around her and that was bad enough.

Her other hand spasmed and the phone tumbled from her feeble grip and hit the ground hard, with a heavy, fractured sound that made her wince. She wasn’t deaf after all.

 

* * *

 

She'd been sleeping.

Although that was happening so seldom lately that she couldn’t tell some days when she was sleeping or awake. She’d think she’d been awake all night, crashed on her couch, zoning out to podcasts and stupid games on her phone, only to “wake up” in her bed, unrested and not able to tell when or how she’d gotten there. Had she dreamed the sleeplessness, or simply finally staggered to her bed in a weary haze?

It happened at work, too. She’d have conversations, conduct interviews even, only to find herself, head down on a convenient flat surface, no recordings, no one around, nothing accomplished again.

Nic was worried, but he was still dancing around it, trusting her doctor, trusting _her_ , for the moment. She was trying to keep her distance from Paul and Terry so they wouldn’t see how badly she was doing and order her to take another vacation.

She didn’t tell Nic she’d stopped seeing Dr. Bernier. He’d find out soon enough, probably when she broke her neck, dozing off as she was walking down stairs somewhere.

But the doctor hadn't been helping. Things were only getting worse. And that was before the dreams—to call them the hallucinations they were was too frightening, though she knew she wasn't always dreaming when they happened.

It was partially, probably predominantly, the podcast: all the stories of people coming forward who ‘remembered’ being sung to, chanted over, promised to unknowable things and unspeakable fates. They weren’t helping.

The first time had happened when she thought she’d nodded off in Dr. Bernier’s office, the stern woman lecturing her again about speaking positively and focusing on relaxing—and wasn’t “focusing” on relaxing a bit paradoxical?—and then thought she heard something else. Chanting? Singing?

She’d shaken herself and looked around, trying to be sneaky about it, but found only the empty room and Dr. Bernier’s severely disappointed expression as she waited for the answer to a question Alex hadn’t been paying attention to. But what could she say that would change the other woman’s grim expression anyway? She wasn’t sleeping. She’d tried the mental exercises, the physical exercises, she put away electronics before sundown, she’d taken the pills, and none of it was working.

It was making her irritable, Nic and Amalia, even Strand had commented on it, and he was all but consumed with his own problems these days. It wasn’t Dr. Bernier’s fault. She probably wasn’t as short and stern as Alex’s sleep-deprived brain imagined.

But the dreams…

The voice, whispering in her apartment. Dr. Bernier’s voice.

No. Ridiculous. It was entirely ridiculous. She was losing it. She _should_ go and ask Terry and Paul for another vacation and this time she’d be smart and not retreat to the proverbial and literal cabin in the woods.

But then there was that sleep note. She’d played it to herself the morning after she’d recorded it, and she’d swear she’d heard another voice, a woman’s voice, _Dr. Bernier’s_ voice whispering in the background. She’d erased instantly, in her panic and her shock and then was left cursing because she was tired and she couldn’t be sure she’d heard what she’d thought. She couldn’t have. She was just tired and now she didn’t have the proof either way.

It was crazy. Something was going to break soon and she needed to make sure it wasn’t her increasingly fragile psyche.

So she’d canceled all her appointments with Dr. Bernier for the foreseeable future.

She’d expected to get the secretary when she’d called but Dr. Bernier had answered herself. It was awkward. She’d gotten pretty abrupt herself at the sharp tone of the therapist’s voice, or at the tone she’d imagined. It wasn’t really Dr. Bernier’s fault but Alex couldn’t keep…she couldn’t—

It didn’t matter, she canceled the appointments and for a few blissful days things had been a little better. She’d managed almost five hours of sleep one night and about four for the two following it. She tried to convince herself that the pressure of the appointments had been part of what was blocking her. That was why she’d kept imagining she was hearing the doctor’s voice when she shouldn’t, at the studio, at home, in the night, in the dark.

_She’d been sleeping._

So she was dreaming? Right? It was just a nightmare when she woke to the labored sound of her own breathing, distant and strange. It was sleep paralysis that kept her from moving. A waking nightmare that Dr. Bernier was standing by her bed, whispering things that made her think of her brief, disturbing interview with that rare books dealer, Gloria Cohen. Dr. Bernier standing beside her, smiling, as she so rarely did when Alex was talking with her, failing utterly at the most natural of activities: sleep.

Dr. Bernier, stroking the hair back from Alex’s face while Alex couldn’t move or speak in response to the strange, incomprehensible things the doctor was saying, the foreign words—no, more than foreign, _demonic_.

It had to be a nightmare. That’s why it was over so quickly; that’s why she could close her eyes—still feeling that hand, still hearing the chanting—and when she opened them everything would be different. And it was—

 

* * *

 

Quiet. She noticed that first, before she’d opened her eyes. That was good, that was right, that was her proof that it had been a dream. It was over, she could open her eyes and—

But the smell.

Her eyes shot open then but it was dark. She wasn’t in her apartment at all but even that wasn’t as terrifying as that smell. She would have recognized it even if she hadn’t smelled it before, she thought, animal instinct, innate and atavistic, would have rebelled and warned her.

It was stronger than when she and Nic had entered the dead housekeeper’s apartment. And sticky? She was sticky because it wasn’t a wall that was painted in blood this time, it was her.

She was covered in blood…oh God, who’s blood? What was going on?

She was quiet, afraid of making a sound, attracting attention in the darkness of this place she didn’t know. She touched her face with trembling hands, her neck, her breath puffing hard and hot against her chilled, sticky skin. The smell was in her mouth, the taste, the stickiness on her lips.

Her stomach heaved, but at least she couldn’t feel any cuts. If it wasn’t _her_ blood…

There was a light to her left, candles on a low stone ledge.

As she struggled to her feet her ankle knocked into something metallic that flew away from her into the darkness, clanging discordantly against the rough, sandy floor. It might have been a cup.

She had to brace herself on the stone platform she’d been lying on, as shaky and weak as she was confused. The stone under her hand was stained with dark smears but it wasn’t sticky. Whatever had been poured over it, and her, it had greedily absorbed. Standing beside it she could see that it was an altar.

Barefoot, in only her nightgown, she reeled, stumbling away towards the grim comfort of the light. Before she was close enough to know what she was looking at, she could already tell it was as wrong as everything else. The candles weren’t on a table or even an altar like the one she’d been lying on, they were perched on the rim of a…a box. A long, narrow box, with human legs visibly sprawled at one end.  

“Simon!” she rasped.

She fought the urge to reach for him, to try to check if he was okay. He wasn’t. His eyes stared sightlessly towards the black markings on the wall above him, too familiar to her and likely they had been to him as well if he’d been alive long enough to see them. His lips were parted in a soft gape, an almost gentle expression in sharp contrast with the violence of the deep wound that slashed across his throat. His hands were draped limply across his lap, at the wrists the skin and muscle had been opened so that white bone gleamed in the candle light.

Her hands, raised helplessly towards the dead young man, caught the light with a wet gleam as well and she realized in a flash of panicked clarity that it was his blood that was on her. And then…then he’d been tossed into the stone coffin by the wall like refuse and she’d been left on the altar, covered in his drained blood like an offering.

_Go._

Yes! Yes, she had to go, she had to escape. Whoever had done this might still be close. Dr. Bernier? It didn’t matter.

She took a step away from Simon and the sacred geometry that had marked his fate, and stumbled. She caught herself against the wall, unaccountably weak, but didn’t waste more time pondering it, instead limping along the wall, hoping that going away from Simon would take her out of wherever she was and not right into the arms of whoever had brought her there.

A dozen steps found her at a corner, three steps past that and the little light that had reached from Simon’s coffin was swallowed entirely in the darkness, but another light burned ahead. Another corner, her head aching, she gasped to see a dimmed kerosene lamp set on an old card table beside, somehow, her open purse. As she got closer she could see her wallet, keys and cell phone, all laid out in a neat row in front of a wooden folding chair.

She could call the police or—no, she needed Nic. Nic would call them and he’d come and—no! Simon Reese had said that Amalia was dangerous and now Simon was dead and Amalia was staying with Nic and—

 _Strand_.

Yes!

 

* * *

 

She stooped to pick her phone up from the stony ground, fighting the wave of dizziness and nausea that rocked her at the movement. The screen was shattered and no matter what she pressed, it remained dark. After a minute of fighting with it she slammed it against the card table, grinding shards of the screen against the cheap surface and almost knocking over the kerosene lamp.

Tears blurred her vision. She didn’t even know if she’d gotten through to Strand. She was going to die here just like Simon.

_Arm yourself._

Yes!

There was a knife on the table beside her purse, just a little, cheap, plastic-handled steak knife, like someone had brought it to eat their lunch and forgotten it. The idea of something so mundane happening here almost made her laugh.

She was hysterical—but her mind was clearing enough to recognize that. That had to be a good sign. She could get out of this. She would make out of the cave and she’d see the sun—sunsets, Simon had said he’d thought they were beautiful—and her parents and Nic and Amalia and Terry and Paul and Strand…

She gripped her fist tight around the handle of the knife. It wasn’t much but it was better than her bare hands.

She tried not to think about how the stickiness of the blood on her made it seem likely that it had been fresh not that long ago. That Simon had been alive _very_ recently. That he’d died in the room, while she was there, perhaps not long before she’d woken. Could she have saved him? If she’d woken sooner—

She lifted the kerosene lamp from the table and took it too. She was afraid the light would leave her blind to things in the dark, but it was another weapon she could use, a blunt weapon, maybe even cleansing fire, she thought grimly, making her way more steadily in the only direction that seemed possible, towards the blowing wind, away from the chamber where she’d woken.

 

* * *

 

“Alex!”

“Richard!” she called back, almost dropping the lamp and knife in her shock and eagerness to not be alone. Outside the mouth of the cave the stars were little and distant above black tree tops where the breeze that had led her to freedom rustled the leaves. She took a few skipping—falling—steps towards the emptiness there before she pulled herself up short, only too late thinking that she might not be wise trusting a voice in the darkness.

“Alex?” the voice called again, but this time she didn’t answer. Even if he had heard her on the phone, how would he have known where to find her? She didn’t know, she certainly couldn’t have told _him_ even if she’d had the time before her phone slipped and broke.

“ _Alex!_ ” It was insistent now. Panicked. But was there a strange…growl underneath the words?

She slowly set the lamp down. She’d already told whatever it was that she was there. It was too late to pretend like she wasn’t now but she didn’t have to wait for it to do whatever it wanted with her.

Clutching the knife, she stepped away from the light into the shadows, fighting the urge to make a run for the trees. For all she knew that was what it wanted.

“Alex! Where are you?”—it sounded so like him, how could she not answer—“Alex, if you can answer me, answer me!”

There were tears hot on her cheeks, wet tracks in the blood that still smeared her face, making the smell rise fresh around her as she fought disparate instincts. There was no way out. She didn’t want to die. She had to—

A darker silhouette appeared at the mouth of the cave. Tall, much, much too tall.

She choked back a gasp and struggled not to drop the knife from wet, nerveless fingers the way she’d dropped her phone, more afraid of alerting it to her location even than of being weaponless. She doubted her little steak knife could do anything to something like that but maybe if it continued into the cave looking for her she could sneak out when it was gone.

It filled the cave entrance, its head looming high above her, a shadow-shape reminiscent of the trees it had stalked forth from, elongate, impossible, heart-stopping.

“Alex?”

But in spite of its monstrously wrong appearance, it still spoke with Strand’s voice.

Her knees were locked, her body frozen, but somehow something crunched under her foot anyway.

In an instant the thing turned on her.

“Alex!” So concerned. Did it think that just because it sounded like Strand she wouldn’t be able to see that it wasn’t? “Dammit, are you—Alex, are you…” She could hear him swallow heavily, his concern choking his words. But it _wasn’t_ Strand in front of her. The thing had leaned in close enough for her to see its face in the poor light cast by the kerosene lamp, a face like a thing long dead, skin pulled taut and thin as a sheet over too prominent bones, empty eye sockets, gaping mouth, but all covered over with that thin, unlikely white ‘skin.’

It cocked its head as it waited for her to respond. No, it turned its head. No, its head turned around completely, revolving like a wheel with the axel at the nose, until that covered, gaping mouth was where the eyes should be and—

She screamed and rushed it. If she was going to die then she would go fighting. The knife was in her hand and she aimed it for the base of the monster’s long neck but missed, plunging the five inch, serrated blade closer to its shoulder instead.

It grunted and gasped, falling back. There was a rushing sound in her ears that she didn’t think was just the wind. Maybe it was the monster, echoing the whispering voices of Dr. Bernier and Gloria Cohen. Darkness moved around her like flailing arms, like black cloth whipped into a frenzy, like—

Strand, confused, betrayed eyes blinking dazedly, brow furrowed, hair mussed, as he stared up at her from the floor of the cave, the black plastic handle of the cheap knife jutting from his shoulder, casting a shadow as though it was some macabre sundial, although as she rushed to his side she realized the ‘shadow’ was a creeping trail of fresh blood.

“Richard?” she whimpered, but he was quiet.

She knelt with his limp hand pressed to her cheek, her forehead against his belly, not caring that the ruckus of tramping feet and voices a few moments later turned out to be the police.

 

* * *

 

“I wish you would try to sleep, Alexandra,” Amalia said, not for the first time. Her Russian accent was thicker with the gravity of her concern.

“I will, really. Just…later.”

“Alex,” Nic said, cajoling and nagging all at once, making her smile at him as he pressed another steaming mug of chamomile tea into her hands.

“I will, _mom_. I’ll take the stuff they gave me at the hospital. I just—not yet, okay? One more episode?”

Amalia sighed as Alex hit play again and Netflix dutifully started loading. She could tell her friend was about to say something else, but she was interrupted by a knock on the door to Alex’ apartment.

Alex grabbed at Amalia’s hand and Amalia gripped it tightly back. Nic was the only one who stood.

“No. It’s fine, no one should be—”

“Who is it?” Nic demanded, his cheerful voice unusually hostile.

“Strand.”

“Oh…” Nick paused, halfway between her couch and her front door, shooting Alex a ‘look.’

She swallowed and nodded but when she tried to throw off the blanket that was draped over her lap Amalia fought it back into place with a frown. “Nic will get him. You stay,” she said firmly and Alex rolled her eyes, but she knew better than to bother arguing when Amalia had that look in her eye.

The two men exchanged a few words at the door, speaking too softly for her to hear from the couch, which annoyed her.

“You know, I’m right here,” she called, ignoring Amalia’s little smirk.

Strand pushed past Nic immediately, which was more gratifying than it probably should have been, walking over to the couch but stopping when he was still a good distance away. Out of range if she wanted to suddenly jump up and stab him.

“You look…well,” he said stiffly.

“So do you,” she said, subdued now that he was standing there, in her apartment, not even visibly worse for wear even though she’d stabbed him not three full days before and he’d ended up with a minor concussion from the fall as she’d rushed him.

“I brought you, uh, your—here,” he said, holding out a brown paper bag. She tried not to be conscious of the fact that although he stepped forward he stayed far enough away that only with both of their arms fully extended could she even take the bag from him.

She could never blame him for it, but it hurt.

Putting on her best effort at a fake smile, which was pretty darned good, actually, honed to a formidable weapon by an endless stream of interviews for the radio station, she checked the bag, wondering what the appropriate “thank you for not actually killing me when you stabbed me after I came to rescue you” present was.

“My phone!”

His face relaxed a little at the delight in hers.

“The police fixed it?” she asked, running her thumb over the undamaged screen, entering her password when it lit up.

He took a step closer. “I have a friend on the force. I promised I’d have it repaired for them if they let me have it as soon as they were done processing it as evidence. Then I might have…urged them to process it quickly.”

“But how could they ‘process it?’ It’s password protected now,” she said.

He gave her an almost pitying look. “It wasn’t hard to guess the password. PNWS?”

“Alex!” Nic groaned.

“I helped you edit the last _Tanis_ , Nic, don’t you even start! _You_ went to meet—”

“And on that note…” Amalia said briskly, standing up. “I think it’s time for me to get ready for bed. Nicodemus, why don’t you come with me? Alex’s sink is large enough for both of us to brush our teeth. It will save time.” But then she frowned at Alex again. “And we will make sure we don’t take too long, so Alexandra can have her chance in the bathroom and _go to bed_ soon as well.”

“Isn’t it cute when she uses full names?” Nic said, a bit of a besotted smile teasing at his lips.

“Bah!” Amalia said, grabbing his arm and dragging him away.

“I thought she had a girlfriend in Russia?” Strand asked.

Alex looked up, used to Amalia and Nic and distracted by having her phone back. Somehow that was even more comforting than being home in her apartment after two days in the hospital. Strange.

“Oh, she does. But it’s an open relationship and Amalia said things are sort of strained between them at the moment anyway because she’d had to disappear for so long and now she’s stuck here in the States until the fallout from her last story dies down.”

She looked up when he sat down beside her—heavily, shaking the couch cushion. He sighed. He was looking away from her, at the TV where an episode of a sitcom she didn’t even like had been playing while she wasn’t watching.

“I’m sorry!” she blurted out, because she needed to say it and she didn’t know how to start.

He smiled, a small, sad smile that made her heart hurt. He’d looked sad a lot lately—and that was before she’d stabbed him.

 He was leaning forward over his legs, his arms braced on his knees, and she put her hand on his wrist, expecting him to pull away. “I didn’t mean to—”

He covered her hand with his other one. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. Richard, I stabbed you!”

He shook his head. “Why didn’t you call me? Nic says he told you that I’d wanted to talk.”

“I didn’t have a phone?” she said, a weak attempt at humor, or prevarication.

He looked at her, so…just… _himself_ that she wanted to cry.

“After what I did, I couldn’t face you,” she said softly, proving her words by looking away.

He sighed again. He sounded more tired than she was.

“Alex…I’m sorry.”

“What do _you_ have to be sorry for?” she asked, the ridiculousness of his apology making her smile a little in spite of herself.

“This is all my fault,” he said, so plainly and simply she looked at him again, trying to read what he meant in his expression.

“Why do you say that?”

“Have you wondered how I knew where you were?” he asked.

Only when she’d thought he must be a monster. “…Richard?”

“I got a phone call. They said they had you, and gave me coordinates. They told me not to bring the police.”

“So of course you brought the police.”

“I didn’t bring them. I just called them to make sure they arrived as well.”

“That was smart.”

He grunted.

“I still don’t see what you have to apologize for.”

His hand squeezed hers. “I think you were…bait.”

“Bait?”

He sighed. “I think they took you to get to me.”

“Why would someone do that?”

“I don’t know!” he almost shouted, anguish in his expression, though he got hold of himself quickly and his voice was more even when he continued. “But I think they took you to try to lure me out to them. They would have been waiting. If you hadn’t stabbed me in your delirium I think they would have done worse.”

When he’d first told her of his fears that he was being stalked her initial reaction was that he was being paranoid. Maybe not without reason, after the disappearance of his wife so many years before and in light of the enmity he courted in so many of his ‘colleagues’ and their fans, not to mention any true believers in the paranormal who were aware of him and work, but even so. After what she’d just been through it was harder for her discount anything though.

“Do the police have any leads? Simon Reese’s body…”

A strange expression crossed his face. “They didn’t find it.”

“What?”

“They didn’t find Simon Reese, alive or dead. The chamber you told them about was empty. The altar was there, the markings on the walls, the candles, even the blood. There was no body in the stone box where you’d said it was. There was also no cup, or anything else, on the floor that you might have knocked over as you fled.”

“That’s…not possible,” she muttered, stunned. “It was there. I saw it! There must be another way out of the cave. They waited until I was gone and then they went back and took the body and left another way!” Although it made her sick to think they’d been so close while she was so weak. Watching her fumble her way through the dark. They could have done anything they wanted at any time.

“There isn’t another way out of that particular cave.”

“There must be! Unless they took the body out past us while you were—you were lying there. Simon Reese’s body _was_ in that cave!”

“I believe you,” he said. “The test results haven’t come back on the blood yet, but I believe you that it’s his. But there still isn’t another way out. You walked the whole thing, from the deepest chamber where the altar was set up, through one long hall, including where you found the card table and your purse, to the entrance, where I…found you.”

She sat in shocked silence for a few long, moments. He was the one to break it.

“I’m leaving.”

She looked at him. He hadn’t even stood, he hadn’t even released her hand yet, he didn’t seem to be leaving quickly. But then she understood.

“No. You can’t just go.”

“Alex—”

“No!” She clutched at him. “You can’t leave because of this. Whatever happened, you can’t just leave m—you can’t just let them win!”

“You could have been killed. If they hadn’t called, I might never have even known what happened to you. You would have just disappeared. Like…”

“Richard,” she couldn’t keep the note of pleading from her tone.

He looked away.

“Record a special announcement episode. Tell everyone I’m going out of the country—indefinitely. That the black tapes are over.”

“I can’t.”

He did stand then, pulling his hands away. She had too much pride to clutch at them like she wanted to.

“You don’t have a choice.”

 

* * *

 

Strand was gone by the time Amalia and Nic came back. The only other thing he’d said had been _good bye_ as he’d closed her front door behind him.

Amalia had taken one look at her and immediately gotten her moving towards the bedroom. Nic, going instinctively into White Knight mode, tried to ask what had happened but Amalia just shooed him to his temporary bed on the couch, muttering something under her breath about _men_.

She wouldn’t be put off any longer on Alex taking one of the pills the hospital had sent home with her and this time Alex was glad enough to let the waking world fade away.

 

* * *

 

She woke up several hours later, Amalia breathing softly in the bed beside her. She was tired enough to go back to sleep but she needed to use the bathroom and she took her phone to light the way, not really wanting to walk through even so familiar a space in the dark right now.

She could hear Nic snoring from the living room and the sound was…comforting. He could have taken the bed in the guest room but he’d opted for the couch so he could guard the door. Amalia could have taken the bed in the guest room but neither she nor Nic had wanted Alex sleeping alone. She was lucky to have such good friends.

She skipped idly through her various notifications while she brushed her teeth—since Amalia had been in such a hurry to put her to bed that she hadn’t given her the chance, in spite of her earlier promise. One handed, thumb tapping, she checked her email, her skype, her twitter, her facebook. There had been something off that she’d noticed about her phone earlier but with Strand there she hadn’t pursued it right then and now, still a little groggy from the meds that were so much more successful than anything Dr. Bernier had ever prescribed, she was having trouble remembering what that had been.

It was definitely something, she thought, spitting out a mouthful of white foam into her sink.

Her sleep notes! When she’d been checking earlier it didn’t look like there were any sound files saved to her phone, but she knew for a fact there should have been three sleep notes she hadn’t downloaded or deleted yet. Unless the police had taken them off for some reason, to study for clues or something.

With a yawn, only a little interested, mostly just taking the opportunity to put off walking through the dark apartment back to her bed, she plunked down on the closed toilet and checked her cloud storage. No one could have messed with that; in spite of Nic’s opinion of her security measures, you did have to know her password to check her cloud and that password was more involved than the abbreviation of the radio station where she’d worked for so long.  

And there were her files, safely stored to her cloud.

Only…there were four, not three.

There shouldn’t have been anything that frightening about that, she’d just forgotten to delete something. Her phone was set to automatically back up her sound files to the cloud, maybe she’d taken another recording by accident, it wouldn’t have been the first time for that either.

But she felt a sick sense of dread overcoming her and she shifted on the toilet until she could keep the shower in her peripheral vision, suddenly remembering that ‘nightmare’ she’d had about finding Maddy, the dead housekeeper, hanging there, only much more mobile than a hanged woman should be.

The fourth sound file, ‘Untitled,’ was time stamped the night she’d been kidnapped.

Her hand shaking, wishing she hadn’t thought to check on this until the morning but helpless to ignore it now, she pressed play.

It started off with only the sound of her breathing and several long minutes of just that and the restless sound of the sheets rustling as she tossed, made it seem likely that it was indeed a recording she’d made by mistake.

Her blood ran cold when she heard the voice.

Not her voice, she would never have been convinced by Nic that this strange whispering in the middle of the night was her own mumbling.

“Hello, Alex,” Dr. Bernier crooned through the recording. “It’s finally time to play your part!” she said, sounding hushed but cheerful.

Alex had convinced herself it wasn’t true. That her dream ‘before’ she’d been taken had been just that: a dream, and probably more than a little bit the result of the unidentified drug that had been found in her system. She’d told the police, dutifully, because she’d told them everything she remembered, even what she thought she’d dreamed, but they hadn’t believed it any more than she had in the cold light of day. A prominent psychologist and sleep specialist didn’t break into her clients’ homes, drug them, _chant_ over them, and then kidnap them. It was ridiculous.

But this was Dr. Bernier’s voice. She slipped from her greeting almost immediately into chanting, just like Alex remembered.

Her memory didn’t go any further than the chanting, but the recording on her phone, a recording someone had tried to erase, did. For a moment there was silence. Then a rustling sound.

“Good girl! Alex, listen to me. Listen! This is what you must do. Listen:

“Go.

“Call Strand.

“Arm yourself.”

Words made commands made compulsions. She didn’t remember Dr. Bernier saying them but she remembered the feelings as she’d stumbled through the cave. It had seemed so logical at the time, it was almost impossible to believe it might have been…what? Hypnosis? Dark magic?

But even that wasn’t as chilling as the last words Dr. Bernier had left her with.

“ _Kill him_.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope it didn't suck!


End file.
